15/09: NOT A PARTRIDGE IN A PEAR TREE

No art updates this morning.   Spent the day at the Pilgrims Hospice eBay office yesterday photographing and listing lots of items to be sold to raise money for this brilliant charity.   Last year sales of donated items on the Pilgrims Hospice eBay site raised more than £100,000 (which actually is just a drop in the ocean compared to the costs of running the three Kent Hospices).   Once home it took a few hours to catch up with all the emails and phone messages etc., so too tired to draw last night.

Today we have lots of errands to run and the Vet is booked to give Roxy (my horse) her flu/tetanus jab and check her over before the onset of Winter.  Poor old girl ... her teeth have worn down so much she struggles to eat and has to have a special 'pensioner's diet'.  We had a particularly hard Winter last year and she didn't come through it very well - lost a lot of weight and was miserable. She is turned out every day and comes into a warm/dry stable at night but apart from fitting her for dentures there's not much more to be done I fear.

Anyway,  we have had a regular visitor to the garden for the last week.   A beautiful Jay (not a partridge) has earmarked our old pear tree as a resting place and he sits there happily for hours.    It has been a good year for berries in our garden and in the hedgerows surrounding it so, although we don't have oak trees/acorns in the garden, I guess there's enough food to attract him and keep him happy.    Unfortunately, the angle of my photo isn't great so you can't see much of the beautiful bright blue feathers on his wings - but he is a handsome bird.

and here are a few of the pears I picked last night.   Must confess I hadn't looked at the fruit recently and was disappointed to find many of the pears have started to rot.   I read that pears don't actually ripen on the tree but need to be picked and allowed to ripen indoors.  So this is the first batch - I'll harvest another lot this evening when we get home.   


Nice pears!!